Disaster Drill conducted at Lahey Clinic in Burlington

Tuesday

Jun 7, 2011 at 12:01 AMJun 7, 2011 at 7:19 AM

Under this morning's hot sun, the Burlington Fire Department, First Response Teams, and Lahey Clinic personnel conducted a “code green disaster drill” which included 22 mock patients with varying injuries played by aviation students of Hanscom Air Force Base.

Pamela Cyran

Under this morning's hot sun, the Burlington Fire Department, First Response Teams, and Lahey Clinic personnel conducted a “code green disaster drill” which included 22 mock patients with varying injuries played by aviation students of Hanscom Air Force Base.

“Code green” is for a mass influx of patients, said Steve Danehy, director of media relations for Lahey Clinic. The mock disaster was a plane crash at Hanscom Air Field in Bedford, involving six patients which had to be treated for jet fuel contamination.

When a disaster such as this happens, the Emergency Room contacts the administrator on call, who will then make a decision based on the magnitude of the event and acts as incident commander for the remainder of the time the code is still in motion, said Danehy.

For Tuesday’s mock disaster drill, the administrator on call, Jeffrey O’Brien, called an administrator consult, consisting of only a handful of administrators. Together, they made the decision to call the incident a “code green.”

Once “code green” is called, a page is sent out to the rest of the administrators and the hazmat teams to immediately start setting up. The Burlington Fire Department, EMTs, and Lahey’s environmental service crew put together a mass decontamination tent outside in the ER in approximately twenty minutes.

Inside the decontamination tents patients are stripped and scrubbed. Mock patients wore bathing suits under their clothes for Tuesday’s drill. According to Burlington Fire Department’s Captain Robert Paul, Johnson and Johnson baby soap is sufficient for jet fuel decontamination.

If it was more of an inhalation biohazard, different measures would apply. All team members would be “on air” using oxygen tanks and the entire section would be quarantined. Lahey personnel practiced using the oxygen tanks before the patients arrived, as instructed by Captain Paul.

The drill is acted in real time, specifically used for training purposes and conducted as real as possible, said Jaclyn Caruso, Lahey Clinic marketing project manager.

“All hospital operations are still going on,” said Pamela Johnston, director of news media for Lahey Clinic. “The drill should have as little impact as possible. If you’re here with a broken foot, you’re still getting treated.”

Inside the hospital’s command center, Incident Commander O’Brien led his crew through the incident with constant updates. The command center oversees all administrators holding a series of defined rolls. According to Jeff P. Doran, chief operating officer, any incident, whether it be a “bomb, volcano, or earthquake is managed in the exact same way.” All public service departments and volunteers are trained in the same methods said Doran.

After a final round of updates and evaluation with the administrators, the Incident Commander makes the decision to terminate the code green. Once the disaster drill ran its course, the administrators critiqued the morning’s events.

“This drill was very successful but there will always be communication issues,” said Doran. “We can always improve.”